A digital sender is a system designed to obtain scan documents (for example by scanning), convert the documents to a chosen format and route the formatted document to a desired destination or destinations using an available communication protocol. Digital senders generally support a variety of document types, a variety of data formats, and a variety of communication protocols.
Examples of typical document formats include tagged image file format (TIFF), multipage TIFF (MTIFF), portable document format (PDF), and joint picture experts group (JPEG). Examples of typical communication methods include computer networks and facsimile transmission (fax).
Documents can be classified based on content. For example, text documents typically contain black text on a white background. Formats used to transmit text documents typically are optimized to provide for crisp edges to effectively define characters. Traditional fax is designed to efficiently transmit text (black text on a white background) documents.
Graphics documents typically contain color or grayscale images. Formats used to transmit continuous tone images, for example, continuous tone color photographs, can be very effectively represented using the JPEG format.
Mixed content documents typically include a combination of text and graphic data. These documents often require more specialized solutions because existing formats used for transmission and storage of image data are optimized for use with either black and white text, or with continuous tone images.
The current TIFF specification supports three main types of image data: black and white data, half tones or dithered data, and grayscale data.
Baseline TIFF format can be used to store mixed content documents in black and white (i.e. binary) formats. Baseline TIFF format supports three binary compression options: Packbits, CCITT G3, and CCITT G4. Of these, CCITT G3, and CCITT G4 compression are compatible with fax machines.
Halftoning algorithms, such as error diffusion, can be used to create a binary representation of (i.e. binarize) a continuous tone image. Such an image can be subsequently compressed using CCITT G3, and CCITT G4 compression so they are suitable for fax transmission. However, CCITT G3 compression, and CCITT G4 compression generally do not provide for the desired the compression ratios for halftone images, particularly when used for compression of images halftoned using error diffusion. This is problematic because error diffusion is a method for producing high quality binary representations of images when the sampling resolution is limited (e.g., 300 dpi).
Packbits compression is a run length encoding algorithm that is more effective at compressing error diffusion halftones than CCITT G3 or CCITT G4 compression. However, the size of PackBits compressed files may be larger than is desirable.